The Closing of a School Sets off an
Alarm for West Quebec’s
English-Speaking Communities
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The Closing of a School Sets
off an
Alarm for West Quebec’s
English-Speaking Communities
On June 27, the Western Quebec School Board announced the closing of the high school in Campbell’s Bay, John Paul II, which takes effect a mere sixty days later, thereby forcing the students to be bussed to nearby Pontiac High in Shawville. Citing a constitutional guarantee in Section 23 of the Charter to have their children educated in their minority language at the public’s expense where numbers warrant, five parents have retained the services of well-known English rights lawyer, Brent Tyler, and will file a motion seeking a court order to keep the school open while going to trial over the larger issue of whether or not the Western Quebec School Board and Quebec’s Ministry of Education have indeed fulfilled their constitutional obligations to the parents to provide an education for their children of similar quality as to be found in the majority language schools.
At the heart of this dispute, we find a conflict between the desire of a historic minority community within the Pontiac to have a high school in their community and the administrative expediency of concentrating the delivery of educational services to school-age children.
Historically, the English-Speaking Catholic Community in the Pontiac has had to struggle to get and maintain adequate educational facilities. Thirty years ago, the community protested about the condition and location of the old Victoria High School in Shawville and successfully petitioned the provincial government to build a new high school in Campbell’s Bay, which is more centrally located for a community that stretches from Luskville to Fort Coulonge. With the amalgamation of the Protestant and Catholic School Boards in 1998, no boundaries were established forcing parents to send their children to Pontiac High, the former Protestant high school or to John Paul II, the former Catholic high school. Parents retained the right to choose which school they would enroll their children. Over time, however, educational opportunities like French Immersion and an educational program for academically challenged students were withdrawn from John Paul II and located at Pontiac High. In other words, institutional incentives were created to incite a net transfer of students from one high school to another, eventually leading to the creation of an administrative scenario that justified the closing John Paul II.
From a purely administrative perspective this might appear to be a sound practice, but surely from a community based point of view the closing of Jean Paul II is a disaster for the English-Speaking Catholic Community in the Pontiac and an event that should sound the alarm bells for other English-speaking communities in West Quebec since the Western Quebec School Board has served notice in its five-year strategic plan that it may close other schools in Low, Wakefield, Onslow, and Poltimore.
From the community perspective, the demise of the local parish as the focal point of community activities has meant that the schools in a community have become the new pole of attraction. Close the schools and the raison d’être for people coming together within a community setting is sufficiently diminished to threaten the continued vitality and sustainability of the community. This is a dynamic that has not been lost by the Supreme Court of Canada which held in Arsenault and Cameron that a school is the most important institution in a minority language community as it is the means by which language and culture are transferred from one generation to another. In that case, the provincial government of Prince Edward Island was ordered by the Court to build a new free standing school for approximately forty Francophone students. In Campbell’s Bay, the parents are asking simply that a school remains open to house the current 75 students and that the provincial government provides sufficient funds so that the school is properly funded so that it can attract other students from the approximately 250 eligible students in its catchment basin.
Of course, underlying this dispute is the larger question of whether or not the provincial government provides the necessary funds to enable the Western Quebec School Board to meet the provincial government’s obligations to provide education to the linguistic minority that is on par to what it provides for its linguistic majority. Certainly, using a funding formula that allocates 80% of funds on the basis of enrollment discriminates against the English-speaking minority. In fact, Bill 101 restricts enrollment to English public schools in such a way that any decline in enrollment brought on by a shift in demographics cannot be offset by an increase in enrollment from either the immigrant or Francophone population. Essentially, a significant drop in enrollment brings with it a proportional reduction in revenues which results in either the closing of schools, the limitation of educational opportunities or both.
The problem is further compounded by growing number of couples which have the right to send their children to English schools but opt instead to take advantage of the enhanced educational opportunities offered in the French schools. Indeed, the net transfer of students that we have seen from one public school to another in the Pontiac as a result of institutional incentives is also happening at the larger scale of net transfers from the English School Boards to the Francophone School Boards. Case in point, the number of English-speaking couples in Chelsea sending their children to the French elementary school has created a situation where the French school in the town is overcrowded while the English school stands half empty.
Over the long term, the dynamic of reduced enrollment leading to reduced educational opportunities which leads to further reductions in enrollment renders the English public education system unsustainable. Fortunately, the parents in Campbell’s Bay have the courage to take action in order to halt the system’s trajectory into a death spiral. Faced with a looming 20 to 25% drop in enrollment due a demographic decline of young children within the community, it’s time others in English-speaking community heed the alarm and also rise to action, including the Western Quebec School Board which needs to crawl out of its administrative shell and attack the problem head on.
Brian Gibb
Executive Director
Regional Association of West Quebecers